A top Senate Republican issued subpoenas for FBI informant and University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper to provide documents and appear for testimony this month as part of a review of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, issued the subpoenas to Halper, 76, via the FBI informant’s lawyer Robert Luskin this week. They were exclusively obtained by the Washington Examiner.
The documents subpoena asks Halper to “produce all records related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation; the Department of Justice Inspector General’s review of that investigation; and the ‘unmasking’ of U.S. persons or entities affiliated, formally or informally, with the Trump campaign, Trump transition, or Trump administration” by Oct. 14. The subpoena for Halper’s in-person testimony directs him to appear for a closed-door grilling about the same topics at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Oct. 20.
If Halper complies, it would mean his records and testimony would be provided not long before the Nov. 3 election. The Washington Examiner reached out to Luskin for comment.
The Republican-led Senate Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines in September to reaffirm and broaden Johnson’s subpoena authority for witnesses in an inquiry into the Russia investigation. The panel’s June business meeting had authorized subpoenas for 33 Trump-Russia figures, and after efforts by Democratic ranking member Sen. Gary Peters to throw up roadblocks, the September meeting reauthorized the subpoenas for all of them in an 8-6 vote. The panel also approved subpoena authorization authority for seven more possible witnesses, including Halper and his FBI handler, Stephen Somma.
U.S. Attorney John Durham is conducting a separate investigation into the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation.
A report on the FBI’s investigation released by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December said the bureau concealed significant information provided by Halper, a confidential human source dubbed “Source 2.” Halper, a White House veteran of the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, worked as an FBI informant in 2016 and recorded discussions with at least three Trump 2016 campaign members: foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, campaign associate Carter Page, and campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis. While Halper worked for the FBI, he also received thousands of dollars from the Pentagon, ostensibly, for academic research.
When Halper’s role as an FBI informant was leaked to the media in May 2018, it led to accusations from President Trump and Republicans that the Obama administration used Halper as part of an illegal effort to spy on the Trump campaign, dubbed “Spygate” and later “Obamagate” by allies of Trump, though Democrats downplayed the significance of the revelation. Horowitz concluded the FBI “omitted” Papadopoulos’s recorded statements to Halper in September 2016 “denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with outside groups like Wikileaks.” The recorded denials of Russian collusion made by Papadopoulos and also by Page were never passed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as the FBI sought and received the authority to wiretap Page.
At Cambridge, Halper worked for years alongside Sir Richard Dearlove, who had spent decades with MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and was its director from 1999 to 2004. British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was hired by Fusion GPS through Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and authored the discredited dossier used to get Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to target Page, was in MI6 from 1987 until 2009. Dearlove, who left in 2004, called Steele’s reputation “superb.” Recently declassified information has shown a host of problems with Steele’s dossier, including that it may have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
MI5 historian Christopher Andrew founded and Dearlove and Halper helped organize a series of Cambridge Intelligence Seminars that were attended by intelligence community members, academics, and researchers from around the world. One such seminar in 2014 was attended by Michael Flynn, then-President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency director, who played a prominent role in the Trump campaign beginning in early 2016.
Svetlana Lokhova, a Russian-born British citizen, claimed in a 2019 lawsuit that Halper “embroiled an innocent woman,” Lokhova herself, “in a conspiracy to undo the 2016 presidential election.” Lokhova attended the Cambridge seminar in 2014 that was also attended by Flynn and claimed Halper used this dinner as a pretext to spread false rumors about her and Flynn. Halper demanded the federal court have claims labeling him a “spy” and “rat f—er” dismissed and his accuser sanctioned by the judge. Halper claimed Lokhova’s accusations were “spurious” and referred to her accusations about a coup against Trump as “implausible conspiracy theories.” The lawsuit was dismissed in February, but Lokhova filed an appeal.
William Barnett, the FBI agent who handled the Flynn case in 2016 and 2017, was interviewed by the Justice Department last month and revealed he doubted that Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s first national security adviser, had committed any crimes. He also said that he and others cast doubt on any Trump-Russia collusion and that he thought certain FBI investigators as well as prosecutors with special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, such as Andrew Weissmann, were single-minded and overly aggressive in their tactics in going after people in Trump’s orbit, including Flynn, complaining of a “get Trump” attitude.
Mueller’s 2019 report said that Russians interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” criminal conspiracy between Russians and anyone in Trump’s circle.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has also pushed for information about Halper’s role getting paid tens of thousands of dollars by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment while acting as a Trump-Russia FBI informant.
